Lúcio Vinhas de Souza has a B.A. and M.Sc. degree in Economics by the FE/UNL in Lisbon, and a Ph.D. in Economics by the Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He currently is the officer responsible for Belarus and Russia at the DG-ECFIN of the European Commission, and he is also a member of the Managing Board of the UACES (University Association of Contemporary European Studies), and an Associate Fellow of the Institute for World Economics (IfW) and of the United Nations University Centre for Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS). He formerly held positions of Economist at the IfW in Germany and at the United Nations Secretariat, and worked as a Visiting Fellow/Visiting Researcher at the ECARES-Free University of Brussels and the Central Banks of Germany and Estonia. He also worked as a consultant for the European Parliament, and in World Bank, European Union and USAID projects.

His most recent research deals mostly with the macroeconomic issues of "transition" economies, mainly related to the monetary aspects of the Accession of Eastern European countries to the European Union and with trade and monetary policy questions applied to Western CIS countries (Belarus, Russia and Ukraine).

He was also a guest editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics and a co-editor of the Journal of European Affairs. He has a considerable list of publications in serveral different languages.